Wake up – ICAO Selcals

If you ever had an ear on the aero bands, you are already familiar with ICAO Selcalls. With this 2 x 2 tone signal lasting for about 2,2 seconds, a Ground Station alerts a specific airplane to open up for communications. The short video on top of this page shows a typical initial contact, where Ground an Air are testing the Selcal.

This paper (click this hyperlink) describes on three pages with nine illustrations, one video and one audio the procedure and gives some background information. These may improve correct decoding of the somewhat delicate signals, as it will show how to look up the Selcal and follow the flight. BTW: It is planned to extend the pool of 16 tones to 32 tones by September 1st, 2016.

P.S. Remember to save the PDF and open it with a recent version of Acrobat Reader. Otherwise the multimedia (video, audio) will not work!